Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 270: You Don’t Exist. But You Actually Do. Wait, What? | Guy Armstrong

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

In this episode, we take a simple, useful, and down-to-earth stroll through one of the most confounding -- but liberating -- concepts in Buddhism. On the one hand, Buddhists tell us the self is an illusion: “You don’t exist!” On the other hand, they tell us, “Well actually, on some level, you do, of course, exist.” So which is it? The answer is: both. But this concept -- call it not-self, selflessness, egolessness, or emptiness -- doesn’t have to be some hopelessly esoteric riddle; it is actually a game-changer that we can all apply in our own lives. Here to tell us how is Guy Armstrong, who has been a meditation teacher in the insight tradition for decades. He’s written a book called Emptiness: A Practical Guide for Meditators. He is the husband of Sally Armstrong, who appeared on the show just a few weeks ago. I actually conducted the interviews back-to-back last fall. But even though this was recorded before the wretched events of 2020, the concepts herein are, I assure you, perennially useful. Where to find Guy Armstrong online:  Website: https://www.spiritrock.org/guy-armstrong  Book: Emptiness: A Practical Guide for Meditators - https://bookshop.org/books/emptiness-a-practical-guide-for-meditators/9781614295266 You can always get started with the Ten Percent Happier app with our flagship course, The Basics. In The Basics, Joseph Goldstein and Dan Harris discuss the fundamentals of mediation and dispel common myths about meditation in a seven-day meditation series. Visit https://10percenthappier.app.link/TheBasicsPod to get started. Other Resources Mentioned: Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation by Bhikkhu Anālayo - https://bookshop.org/books/compassion-and-emptiness-in-early-buddhist-meditation/9781909314559 Additional Resources: Ten Percent Happier Live: https://tenpercent.com/live Coronavirus Sanity Guide: https://www.tenpercent.com/coronavirussanityguide Free App access for Frontline Workers: https://tenpercent.com/care Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/guy-armstrong-270 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey guys, we've been talking a lot about the meditation challenge. We've been running the summer, the summer sanity challenge. The deadline for joining has passed. However, if you're still interested in learning more about

booting up or rebooting a meditation practice, you can always go check out the flagship course on the 10% happier app. It's called the basics. Joseph Goldstein and I discuss the fundamentals of meditation. We disbell-common myths and Joseph leads you through a seven-day meditation series. I'll put a link to the basics in the show notes. Okay. In this episode, we're going to take a simple useful down-to-earth stroll through one of the most confounding but liberating concepts in Buddhism. On the one hand, Buddhists tell us the self is an illusion. You don't exist.

On the other hand, they tell us, well, actually, on some level, you do, of course, exist. So, which is it? The answer, and this is frustrating, the answer is both. But this concept, which is called not self-selflessness, eagleness, or emptiness, this concept does not have to be some hopelessly esoteric riddle. It is actually a game changer that we can all apply in our own lives. Here to tell us how to do that is Guy Armstrong, who has been a meditation teacher in the insight tradition for decades. He's written a book called Emptiness.

He is the husband of Sally Armstrong, who appeared on the show just a few weeks ago. I actually conducted the interviews back to back last fall, but even though this was recorded before the wretched events of 2020, the concepts herein are, I assure you, perennially useful. So here we go with Guy Armstrong. Well, nice to see you again. Thanks for coming on.

Nice to see you, Dan. So let me just dive back into your biography just a little bit. What was it about back in the 70s about meditation? No, what was it about your life that the practice of meditation and the teachings of the Buddha were such a big deal for you that you actually, you know, you had gone to a fancy college if I recall Rice in Houston and you had worked in Silicon Valley and you were teaching at an alternative school in Palo Alto. You basically put all that to the side and became, as you said, a dharma

bum-why. Well, it was two things. I'd had a longstanding interest in Buddhism, really from my college days. It just spoke to me philosophically in a way that no other system ever had. There was a depth, a precision, and an accuracy, the really resonated with me. And the second thing was, I was not very happy in my life at that time. I came out of the 60s and my life was really unsettled and I did a little too much of all the things that people did too much of in the 60s. And I was still kind of trying to put my life back together. And I never felt invested in the worldly things that I was engaged in. So this Dharma practice came along. And I remember sitting on my first retreat,

and I reached into a level of stillness of mine that I had never felt before. And I think what struck me at that time was the basic, you could call it openness, or you could call it space, that meditation showed me in my mind. I felt anything is possible in this place. So looking back now on that experience, what I tapped into was the basic emptiness, or more congenial word is openness of our mind and our basic situation. I saw anything was possible. And I must admit, I was really drawn by the concept of enlightenment, that there could be transformative moments of insight that would change your life forever in a positive way. You said two things in there. I want to follow up on. When you say anything is possible,

do you mean you could play for the NBA, you could learn how to fly? What do you mean when you say, I don't suspect you do? So what do you mean exactly when you say anything is possible in that space? I meant that the mind could be shaped or formed in any direction one wanted. I just saw this vast potential of the space in the mind that was revealed through that stillness. And I knew that any degree of suffering that had come into my life didn't need to be there. And any degree of happiness that I wanted to find could be discovered in that space. So I just felt the potential of the mind in that open empty space where there was a lot of presence

and you could say heart, love, or happiness, or joy, they were all there. And I saw it could be developed. So suffering can be a rooted happiness, can be cultivated independent of external circumstances. Like if you have a gangrenous wound on your leg or you just lost your dog or whatever, that one can still be happy in whatever circumstances. You know, I wasn't that bold back then. I still don't know. I'd be that bold right now with a gangrenous wound on my leg, but definitely dealing with a normal ups and downs of life. And I'd had a pretty blessed life. At that point, I had no major health risks and no major difficulties in the external world.

I saw that that kind of openness could solve whatever problems I was gonna run into in the normal course of my daily life. Okay, so the other thing you said was that you were intrigued by the notion of enlightenment. What did you think enlightenment meant? Well, the way it had been portrayed in the readings that I'd done it, I'd never met

anybody who said they were enlightened or who I thought might be enlightened. The way it was portrayed was that there could come a dramatic moment of insight or realization that would basically, completely end the problem of suffering in a person's life. This is what had happened for the Buddha. And this had happened to a number of later practitioners that certainly were described in this end tradition. The term satore is the usual term that they used in the tradition I was reading in,

and I believed in the possibility. Would it be safe to say that your mind is a more congenial place now than it was back in 1976? That's an understatement. Okay. That's an understatement. Would it be safe to say the event interesting experiences during the intervening time? Definitely and you know, I just have to say well, I put it in two dimensions. The purpose of insight meditation is twofold. One is to bring greater calm or tranquility into our experience, and that's the experience of both mind and body,

and that line of teaching is called somata, generally translated as tranquility or serenity, and the other benefit is in the area of insight, and that's pointed to by the term vipassana, which basically means seeing clearly. So both those things together have changed my life dramatically. The development of tranquility has left me with a baseline of calm throughout my life, and it can still be disturbed. You know, events can come along that can rattle that,

but I have a confidence that when the temporary event passes, my mind will settle back into that state of fairly stable calm. And the other thing is that the area of insight has shown me things about life that I never imagined in the beginning. And some insights truly are transformative. You still suffer? I mean, you're married to the highly esteemed meditation teacher Sally Ramstrang was sitting, but I'm not just saying that because she's sitting in the room, but she really is a esteemed

meditation teacher. And marriage is, I speak as somebody who's in a marriage, can be amazing, is generally amazing in my experience, but it's also a testing ground because your old patterns are triggered all the time. Plus, you're like any other human being, you have a body on loan from nature and it's subject to aging and illness. So in the face of all of the foregoing, do you still suffer? Yes. I do. And I'm still on the path. I'm still walking the path and I'm still motivated to reach the end of suffering.

But that may take a while. So in the meantime, yeah, I still suffer with all the things that most people probably suffer with. But I don't suffer a lot. Okay. So your book. The book with the supremely attractive title of emptiness. But I think what you're trying to do here, which I really support, is to talk about

emptiness is PR problem, and to show that there's a profound upside to this problematic word. So with that, would you hold forth on the thesis of the book to start? Sure. I'll say a few words, and then you can time in with more. Emptiness is not a very strong advertisement for one of the central religions in the world. It's a provocative term. It doesn't have a huge number of positive connotations in Western culture. At first, I thought it must be a mistranslation. I thought, surely, the Buddha wouldn't have pointed in this direction. But I looked up the original poly, as shunyata, it basically

means the same thing in poly that it does in English. And the word empty asunya, the Buddha would say, there are these empty huts, go meditate, and that word was shunyata. So it really just means empty. I think the Buddha was using it to be provocative. And to tell us that I'm going to upend some of your assumptions about religion and some of your assumptions about life. So I think as Westerners, we can take it with that same kind of warning or caveat. It's going to be a not controversial, but it's going to be a provocative topic to talk about. It's also not a really easy topic to talk about because it has a number of meanings. also not a really easy topic to talk about because it has a number of meanings, and the implications go quite deep in terms of our experience of life and in terms of the Buddhist teachings or philosophy. But I would sum it up by saying that what the Buddha was pointing

to with this word is that things are not as solid as we normally take them to be. We being untrained individuals who are new to meditation or the Buddhist teachings. Things are not as solid and that is reflected in two primary ways. There is not a solid or fixed self that's in the middle of our individual experience. So this is the meaning of the Buddhist teaching on not self.

We do have a manifest existence as individuals, but within that individual existence, there's not something fixed that you can point to and say that is the self. And I think this itself is a provocative idea because I think if we look at it honestly, most of us do kind of feel that there's a self in here. There's a little me in here.

Most of us have never even thought about the concept of the self at all. Well, that could be, but we've taken it for granted from the time we could use language. Yes. Like, if I ask you, you know, how old are you? And you say, you know, I'm 40. 40, okay. You, I'm 48. Okay. You say I'm 48. Well, is all of you 48?

Are your hairs 48 years old? Are your thoughts 48 years old? No, you mean the body. So we've grown up thinking that, oh, I am the body. Can I get it? All the atoms I believe in my body have switched out several times since I've born. Right. Right. the way all the atoms I believe in my body have switched out several times since I've worn. Right.

Right. But overall, when somebody says I'm 48, they mean the body is 48. You can't pop out 48 years ago. So that's the most maybe deeply held assumption I am the body. But at other times, I'm not asking you, Dan, what color your eyes? Green, I think. Okay. So you could say my eyes are green. Now you're not the body,

but you're some entity who owns the body. They're my eyes, and this is my body. So which, are you? Are you the body? Are you the one separate who owns it? So we've grown up with all this language. We can do the same with emotions. could say, I'm happy, I'm sad. Then we equate ourselves with any emotion, but we can also talk about my joys and my sorrows. So those are four ways that we lay claim with an eye or my relationship. And by the way, whenever the self is expressing itself, the words, I, me, mine, will be visible around it. That's how the self expresses itself.

So we're really talking about what is the idea of I or I that we carry around. So those are four ways. Another way that's really commonly felt is, oh, what I really am is the observer of everything. And I'm located inside my head, behind my eyes and between the ears, and I'm always kind of looking out on experience, sights and sounds and smells and tastes, and I'm the observer of all that. But I'm not those things. So that's a fifth way.

So and there are more. So just by the use of language, as kids, we've grown up with this sense that I am something. And what the Buddha said is that, yeah, that's a convenient use of language, but the word I doesn't actually refer to anything that exists. And that's kind of a shock when you wake up and contemplate that. When we use the word all the time, it's the center of our universe, really. And yet, when we're asked to explain it clearly, we can't really define it. Because the eye is empty of substance. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, there's nothing within this mind and body process that is fixed, that could take on the quality of an eye.

So there are a couple of things about the self when you step back and think about it that we assume are true. One is that it's continuing, that it's constant and ongoing, because otherwise we wouldn't be worried about dying. that it's constant and ongoing because otherwise we wouldn't be worried about dying You know, we just kind of think that in some way on some deep level It's the same eye that went to second grade as is sitting here talking in the room right now If that were true, you would remember everything about second grade It might be in there somewhere right could be It might be in there somewhere. Right, it could be. But you look for an entity that fulfills that qualification

and you look within the body, it's always changing. The cells are growing and dying and re-growing. You look within the mind, thoughts, emotions go by like arrows, super fast. There's nothing within this whole mind body process that isn't subject to change and therefore could be that ongoing thing. So we can use the word I to refer to this package, which is the body, which is changing, thoughts and emotions, which are changing, and it's more like a river than it isn't a

thing. So you look into a river, it's always changing. And it's more like a river than it isn't a thing. So you look into a river, it's always changing. And yet it's useful to call things the Mississippi River, the Colorado River. We kind of know where we're pointing to, but there's nothing fixed in the river. And there's nothing fixed in us that could really be called a self. So you want me to ask a question? I think go ahead. I was going to say so what? Yeah. So it changes everything because we base all our main thoughts, feelings, life decisions, evaluations around this concept of I. And when you find out there isn't one, I can say as it changes everything. And what it does is it opens us up to a much broader sense of

what life is. But just one simple example, it takes away the barrier between inside and outside, at least momentarily. When one has the insight into not self, that doesn't make sense to talk about what's inside is me and what's outside is not me. Doesn't make sense anymore, because both the experiences of what we call inside, thoughts, emotions, body sensations, are arising in consciousness the same way as

what we call experiences of outside the sight of you right now the sight of the buildings in San Francisco outside this room the sounds of the traffic the air conditioning all those things are arising in the same space of consciousness so the division between inside and outside is seemed to be a conceptual fiction. So part of what that does is it takes away some of the fear about the outside world. There is no outside world. Now, it takes many years for that realization to really sink all the way in, but I believe

it had sunk all the way in for the Buddha, and he had completely overcome any fear of what would happen. The second thing is, and I'd like to suggest this to your listeners who are meditators, meditation instructions always say, stay mindful of something in the present moment. Let's take the breath as a simple example. Be mindful of the breath coming in and the breath going out. Moment after moment after moment, don't lose it. Stay in touch with that.

But invariably, you know what happens. We lose it. It happens to other people, not me. Right. So we lose touch with the breath. Then I'd ask your listeners to examine where does the attention go when it loses touch with a present moment? Self-stuff.

It goes into self-stuff. It goes into self-stuff. So we start thinking about the past. We start thinking about the future. We start thinking about regrets. We think about hopes. We think about fears. And they're all in relationship to eye me mine.

So it goes into basically the movie of I, and it just keeps playing out the stories. Some of them are very old, familiar, repetitive, annoying, you know, very predictable. But one of the things you find out, and again, go and encourage your listeners to check it out, in going into the movie of I, what's the emotional tone like of those excursions? Negative, my experience. It is, isn't it? It's not peaceful, grounding, calming, satisfying, happy. It tends to stir up around places where we've invested energy, largely with things

we've wanted, or things we've not wanted, with ways we've succeeded, or with ways we've been hurt, or ways we're going to succeed in the future, or what we're afraid might happen in the future. So these excursions into the movie of I tend to stir us up a lot, and they leave us less settled as we come out of them. So the insight into notself gets combined with the emphasis on tranquility that I mentioned earlier as the other part of mindfulness meditation, which is things are starting to calm down generally in the mind and body. Thoughts are not as frequent or as intense as they once were, but we start to see the falsity of the projections of past and future that we've been creating and believing in.

We're sitting quietly, some thought comes up about the past, and we realize that thought is not the past. That's just a thought about the past. The past isn't really here. The past is gone. And then we find ourselves thinking about some presentation we're making next week. And we realize next week isn't here. That's not the future.

That's just a thought about the future. It doesn't have any real validity. And so we see they're unnecessary, they waste time, they take us into less happy places, and we start to let go more and more of the movie of I. And then we settle just more and more into a contentment in being in the present moment, just the way it's unfolding, without a strong

need to try to shape it. And this all comes about because we've seen self is intimately tied up with all these excursions into wanting and not wanting, liking and disliking, trying to control and trying to shape. So we start letting go of that. Let's say the unextraneous, unnecessary parts of that project. Of course we have to look after our life, we have to look after our people, our family, our jobs, and so forth, but we don't have to obsess about it. So in letting go of self, we let go of a lot of obsession. And that

just allows more settling. You said before that the line between outside and inside gets sort of revealed as a fiction. I would imagine some people would say, well, there are dangers outside that I need to be aware of. Somebody's coming at me with a sledgehammer. I should be aware. Eminem with a sledgehammer, I should be aware. True. So we take care. We look upon the body and this mind and heart with affection and care, and we don't want it to be harmed.

So we take care with food, we take care with exercise, we take care with medicine. I'll add that as practice develops and motivation clarifies, we see the purpose of this body being in the world as an act of generosity or compassion. So we want to take care not only for our own welfare, but as a way to continue to be able to offer service to other people who are here. So some of the selfishness gets a little bit offset by just introducing a tiny bit of altruistic motivation just to have the concept.

Well, I've heard it said that the true understanding of emptiness, out of a true understanding of emptiness, compassion inexorably arises. Can you explain what that connection might be? Yeah. What the mechanism is? Yeah, I think it's really true. So, you know, the first part of emptiness that we're talking about is seeing the emptiness of self or the absence of self as a true reality. So, starting to question the reality of our assumptions about self.

As that develops, the effect of self or the sense of self, which we still carry for quite a long time, starts to get thinner and thinner and thinner. This would be a really good thing for meditators to start to notice. When is the sense of self really strong and insistent, and when is it weak or not so noticeable? Just simple examples. If somebody insults me or somebody wants to attack me, the sense of self will tend to rise up in response to that. And I'll defend myself or

I'll explain myself or whatever. So the sense of self gets strong when we feel insulted or heard, if we get angry or when we want something a lot. We really want something that is strong sense of eye in that. There are other times when we all experience a sense of self being weak. So sitting on a beautiful beach, looking on a broad ocean, just not caring around the cares of the day, the mind can just kind of expand into that space and beauty, quiet, and the sense of self at that time is quite weak. You know, we're sitting up on top of a mountain and looking at it, a beautiful landscape. Calm comes in, the sense of self gets weak.

As the sense of self gets weaker, it's not predominating our vision of the world with what we want and what we don't want, with our likes and dislikes. Therefore, what is of the world with what we want and what we don't want with our likes and dislikes Therefore what is in the world other people? Oh? My God, there's somebody who's going through a really hard time What can I do to help? There's somebody who's having a lot of joy. Wow, that picks me up So the world of relationships Opens up to us when our hearts not so burdened by worries about ourself.

At your less self-centered. Exactly. Much more of my conversation with Guy Armstrong right after this. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wunderys Podcast, even the rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Ru goes out searching for love

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You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. You also, I believe, mentioned that fear can go down when understanding of emptiness sets in. But as I've heard it said many times, in a meditative context on a retreat, when people get a real glimpse of emptiness, In other words, when they can really see, you can get constricted enough on your breath or whatever it is that you start to see the rapidity of the mind and things are coming and going with such speed that there is a moment where it's been referred to as the rolling up the mat stage where people roll up their meditation mat and leave the room because you realize

things are moving so fast that I'm not real. Is anything real? There's nowhere to, you can't get a toe hold anywhere here. So how is it that it is both terrifying and also the source of a major reduction in fear? So I think of it as, let's say, three phases of the insight into not self. Normally, when it starts to unveil itself to people, its felt is very freeing. Wow, that thing that I just had to work so hard to protect and take care of and build

up and maintain and feed and nourish and all of that. I don't have to do that. Wow, there's so much space now. It's amazing, I feel so much lighter. I feel such a sense of relief. So that's typically the first mode of the realization of not self, big relief, lot of space, happy. Then you continue to investigate your experience,

especially in the course of meditation retreat. And you start to see, okay, now what I'm seeing is how my experience just arises and passes, arises and passes moment after moment, just as you were describing. Nothing is lasting for more than a moment. Okay, there's a lot of potential in that, but as you said, where do I find a foothold? It sort of takes the rug out from under us to see that extent of the emptiness. Then this is the emptiness of phenomena as well as the emptiness of self. Where do I land?

Where do I find ground in all this space? So that can be scary. There's a sense that the, in the ungrounding, where do I locate myself? What does it all mean? Is there any meaning anymore? So this is what leads to the rolling up the mat stage and people might want to leave the retreat at that point. So if that's when it's good to have a teacher around to say, this is normal, this is usual, just keep going. So the person goes through perhaps some period of fear, of doubt, of a loss of meaning. Where's this all leading? And is my life going to come together at all again? But the teacher says says just keep going. And then what is

interesting, one finds there is actually a great piece in allowing things to be in their momentary nature of arising and passing and rising and passing. There's actually nothing wrong with it. There's nothing even threatening about it because there's nothing there to threaten. Really, and that's part of the sense of emptiness. How can we be afraid of nothing? But it takes some getting used to. So then the next phase that unfolds is, oh, I guess it's okay then. So there's a growth in what I would call faith. It's okay that this is the way things are. There's not a ground, the way that I think there used to be, thought there used to be, but that idea I had of ground wasn't realistic.

It hadn't taken into account the way things actually are, indirect experience at this level of meditative understanding. So, I need to adjust to the new situation now that I see the way things are, and the only thing I can do is accept it. There's no point in fighting this. That would just be more craving, more version. All I can do is surrender and accept it. And that brings the third phase, which is a lot of peace. So just to put a fine point in this, this doesn't seem to be the type of realization, at least not for most people, that we're going to have on five or ten minutes a day of meditation. This seems like something that happens on retreat and maybe even repeated retreats. I'd say for most people, I think there are some people with really well developed aptitude

for meditation who could wander into this territory in daily practice. And so praise be beings like that. I think Deepamah might have been in that kind of category. Famous teacher who's no longer with us in India. Yeah, yeah. A woman teacher in India who was a teacher to both Joseph and Sharon. She had incredible aptitude for meditation. It came upon deep insight really quickly. So there will continue to be still some of those people, I believe.

But for most of us, it takes extended retreat practice. The teachings on emptiness and you may have hit on this already, but I think it may be worth talking about it a little bit more, at least I'm curious. In my understanding, which is limited, the way emptiness is talked about has changed within Buddhism over time. So the earlier schools talked about it one way, and then the later schools, the Mahayana, the Vajrayana, talked about it slightly differently. Can you walk us through that progression? Yeah. There's some truth in that, and there's also some, a little bit of later, I would say,

gloss that is not strictly accurate. So in the early discourses of the Buddha, so the tradition of early Buddhism and teravata, the word emptiness is primarily used to point to emptiness of self, teaching on not self. So in a lot of instances, it's really synonymous with not self. The later, let's take the Mahayana schools, and this came out of the Projambhara Meeta Sutras and then a brilliant book by an Indian teacher named Nagarjuna called Root Verses on the Middle Way. Took emptiness as a really central theme. More so than the Buddha had done in his discourses and developed it further. And they emphasized, as well as the emptiness of self, they emphasize

the emptiness of phenomena. So basically, the teaching that all our experience through the sense doors is insubstantial. You've probably heard these analogies, like a bubble in a stream, like a star at dawn, like a flash of lightning in a summer sky. All the things that the senses are characterized by this fleeting, transitory, insubstantial nature. So some of the later schools said, oh, we found this part out about the emptiness of phenomena, and the early Buddhists didn't have this.

In fact, the early Buddhists did have it. They didn't emphasize it as much. Some of the analogies that you read in the later Mahayana are found in the original teachings of the Buddha. For instance, some feeling tone is compared to a bubble in a stream. Perception is compared to a mirage, clear signs of emptiness. And there's one discourse in particular. It's called the lump of foam discourse in the connected discourses of the Buddha, where the Buddha runs through all five components called the five

aggregates and points to their insubstantial nature one after another. And what he says about form, which includes our body and all the rest of the material world, he said, form is like a massive foam. It's like a lump of foam that's floating down the river ganges. How could you imagine there's any substance in a lump of foam? And you can just picture, you know, you clap your hands together and that lump of foam just vanishes.

So the Buddha said, all material form is just like that lump of foam, in substantialstantial transitory. So that pointy to the emptiness of phenomena is also in the early discourses. And there's another way that it's used in the early discourses, which I really love, as a meditation term and a meditation technique, which the Buddha called abiding in emptiness.

So one abides in emptiness basically by taking out all the interpretive projections of concepts, taking those out of the momentary experience, and just being with simpler and simpler facets, for example, you and I are sitting in this room right now with these stunning views. We could be aware of all the different objects in the room as well as the views outside of the buildings and the hills and the flags that are fluttering. But we could also say, let's make it simpler and let's just focus on the space in the room. Let's do this as a meditation. And by just turning our attention to the space in the room,

all of a sudden, all those other perceptions, which tend to stir up the mind with lots of associations, those all settle down, and we're just resting in empty space. So that's a simplification of perception that leads into this sequence, it goes further, that the Buddha called abiding in emptiness. So as a meditation practice,

it's abiding certainly without self-centered thoughts, but without even projective thoughts of interpretation about the objects that are surrounding us. Let's go further into this because you've taken us into the place where I was hoping that we would go, which is,

we established that molecular level understanding of emptiness is most likely to happen in the context of a retreat. But for those of us who just have daily practices or daily ish practices, are there simple techniques we can use to try to get a glimpse of this? simple techniques we can use to try to get a glimpse of this? Yeah, well I think one of the most accessible ways in is something I mentioned earlier in our conversation, which is when a person is sitting and their attention wanders away from the breath, start to look closely at where it's going and ask the question, why is the mind going away at all? And not to think about it, not to try and conceptualize an answer, but just to pose it as an inquiry,

why is the mind fundamentally in this restless place of wanting to look into the past and wanting to look into the future? Just posing that question will halt some of that mental activity because it's undermining the motive for going there. So I think doing that repeatedly in the context of one daily meditation period or doing a day after day as an ongoing practice will help bring more and more emptiness into the person's experience. And here when I talk about emptiness, I'm thinking about this abiding and emptiness quality, which is not dwelling

in the eye movie, not dwelling in self-centered thinking. So I think an avenue to that is just starting to question, why is this self-centered thinking going on at all? And I think that will drop us back into a space without it. Because you see, like, I'm not running this show. This stuff is just happening. It's happening, but there's volition behind it. When we take a thought excursion into the eye movie, there's some desire for sacting. I want to look at my past. I want to look at my future.

For some reason, even though, as you said, it's not very happy making. There's some urge that keeps propelling us in that direction. But by questioning the usefulness of it, we start to undercut that urge. Is there self in the volition? Well, that's an interesting question. Volition is a factor of mind that arises based on other factors that are in the mind at that time. But I want to back up one step and say that when we were talking earlier about how the eye establishes itself, it establishes itself as the body, as the owner of the body, as the emotions, or the owner of the emotions, another place that establishes itself in the

words of one of our former presidents is, I'm the decider. George W. Bush. George W. Bush. George W. Bush. So is a place that many people feel is the true proof of self. Wait, I decided this. You know, where are we going to go for dinner tonight? Let's go to the Asian restaurant down the street. I decided that. So the notion of I as the decider is a subtle place that the sense of I lurks and also has to be explored. So in the Buddha's language, the factor that leads to any choice, any action, body, speech, or mind, the factor that implements that is called volition. the factor that implements that is called volition. The poly term is chatina.

So the question is, is volition is chatina an act of a self or not? So in the Buddha's analysis of it, chatina is just another mental factor, a factor of mind, comes up in every moment. We're always willing, something. But it's being conditioned by all the other factors of mind that are there. So if the factors of mind are loving kindness, generosity, and wisdom, the volition that comes

out of that will be oriented to generous kind actions. If the mind is consumed with greed, with hatred, with confusion. The volition that comes out of that mind state will be one that leads in the direction of unskillful greedy, hurtful action. Kind of take a stab at it. See if I can put this in my own. Yeah. Yeah. Which is where I go with that is, so volition may feel an awful lot like the self. As you just said, it really feels like I'm doing this thing. And yet, if you widen the lens a little bit, you may see that the desire is a habit. Exactly. Because that's conditioned by all of these things. Stuff your parents taught you, sources of pleasure that sent you down one sort of habitual path in your life, et cetera, et cetera.

And then from that perspective, it looks a lot less like some decider. Yes. And you really start to see that all of our actions have an element of conditioning behind them, because all the habits of mind that lead to the actions have been conditioned for years, if not lifetimes. So, volition is kind of acting out the conditioning that's in the mind already, which brings out the question of free will and determinism. So, I have a short answer that I'd like to put into this. The Buddha said that volition is conditioned but not determined. And that means that each fresh moment offers us the opportunity to do something that is not determined by our past limited conditioning. So I understand that to mean spontaneous impulses of generosity,

of compassion, of understanding can come in and influence a volition in that moment. And the way I experience it is, as my practice has gone on, I feel less and less compulsion to the unhealthy directions which were in my practice a lot in the early years. And more and more space, mindfulness opens up a space around choice in our actions. And so it feels like as the years have gone by, I have more and more freedom of choice. I still think my habits of mind are conditioned, even the positive ones are conditioned. I don't have the heart or the unlimited loving kindness of

the Dalai Lama at this point, but they're in better shape. My habits of mind are in better shape now than they were 40 years ago. So the way I experience that is I have a lot more choice when things come up to follow something that will be skillful, and that feels like some degree of freedom of choice as practice has evolved. I don't feel determined by my habits of mind. But is that bolstering your sense of eye though in some ways? Because... No. I think it's just discerning what development has brought about. There's nothing for me to be proud about in that. I've stepped out of the way as much as possible. So it's wisdom that makes the choice. It's loving kindness that makes the choice. So as we recondition the mind, or decondition the mind, away from old habits that are ingrained into us

by our parents or just by evolution, that are harmful to us and others, and we start making more wiser, more wholesome decisions. Part of how that operates in the mind is that we don't even really see ourselves as being the one making the decision. It is, as you said, before the force of wisdom, the force of compassion that is making the decision. Exactly. Just the way, I mean, I've heard this analogy before, that you can look at a person or

an emotion the way you would a weather system. It's not personal. Yes, yeah, exactly. I think one of the things that becomes clearer and clearer over time is that I don't have anything to do with these wholesome qualities of mind that are appearing. Their universal qualities of mind, they're in everybody. Now, admittedly, practice has really helped diminish the obscurations to them. It's really helped diminish the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion that have kept those wholesome habits behind a curtain as it were. But I didn't bring those into creation. And remind me of a quote I want to her, Joseph Goldstein was giving a Dharma talk and he

was quoting some other meditation teacher who said something to the effect of, so now I'm going to, this is a second-hand quote that I'm going to reproduce unfaithfully. But something to the effect of, if you think that your emotions are yours, it's a misappropriation of public property. Good way to put it. Yeah, I mean, the negative ones for sure, but even the beautiful ones ones also public property. It's a headspinning way, quite literally, headspinning way to think about our internal phenomena as it just goes right back

to your principal thesis has not ours. So I guess it's not even your thesis, but that all of this stuff that's happening is just conditioned horizons that we're just adding a layer of eye on top of. I think that's a good way to put it. One way that I think about this is that as you take the eye out of your view of the world and how things happen, you're taking out what most of us hold as a central agent in making stuff happen.

You know, normally think, I decide, I choose, I make this action, I make this happen. You take that piece out and you start to see that everything is arising based on prior causes and conditions. Everything, even what looks like an act of free will in this moment, comes out of past causes and conditions. So, you start to notice, oh, look, all the Buddhist central teachings have to do with cause and effect. Every one of them, the four noble truths is the truth of suffering and the cause of suffering, the end of suffering and the cause of the end of suffering.

It's all about cause and effect. It's all about cause and effect. Karma is all about cause and effect. Doing un-skillful act, un-skillful, un-wholesome results will come back. Do a skillful act, wholesome results will come back. It's all about cause and effect. I had a thought when we were talking about ways to practice in your daily life, emptiness because a lot of this stuff may seem abstruse or just unattainable because I imagine many of these listeners are not you'll be able to go on a ton of retreats. For me, a conceptual breakthrough around emptiness came

and I was taking some online course through the Barry Center for Buddhist Studies, which I recommend to everybody. BCBS, they offer all of these courses either in person in Barry, Massachusetts or online. And we're in a group discussion one night. We're talking about emptiness and how confusing it is. And some guy, it's just a layperson like me, not the person running the call, not one of the teachers, said for him, a big breakthrough had been focusing on a key consonant in the phrase. breakthrough had been focusing on a key consonant in the phrase, it's often referred to emptiness as no self, but actually you have been using the phrase not self.

T is important here because one can just examine anything that arises in the mind and point out if you look for the self in it. Well that's not self as much as it may feel like it as I investigated that's not self. And that's a frame that we can bring to meditation, even if it's just a couple minutes most days of the week or a few days of the week. Just look, evaluate through the simple as possible lens, whatever's coming up in your mind, is that you? Where's the you?

Who's asking the question? Right. Yeah, no, that's a nice way in. And I think the phrasing of not self is really helpful because it's not Positing a philosophical concept. It's directing and inquiring. Yes. Yes. So direct the inquiry Sensations in the body. Can that be a self? Are they ongoing? You know, are they unique to you? But I wanted to experience them. Yeah. Yeah. I would since you me, I wanted to say one more thing about the avenue into emptiness for meditators in daily life. There's a meditation in the book in the chapter

on abiding in emptiness that goes into this step-by-step, but it basically takes people from complex perceptions of their immediate environment in meditation as we talked about, we could look at all the objects in the room or the buildings outside or the hillsides, or we could just focus on the space in the room. And by focusing on the space in the room, it simplifies the perceptions and the mind settles on account of that. So there's an extended sequence of this in the book, chapter abiding in emptiness. And Bicco Analio has written quite a long exposition of the discourse that this came out of, which is one of the middle-length

discourses in his book called Compassion and Emptiness. Well, put a link in the show, the information about that book, Bicco Analio, who's not been on the show as a German monk scholar who now lives in Barry Massachusetts, actually, and has written a number of quite interesting books. Is there anything I should have asked, but didn't? This is a massive topic, so I'm sure the answer to that is yes. Just the one last thing that I'll toss in, when you asked about the later Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions, coming in with new understandings around emptiness, one of the main ones is the relationship

of awareness to emptiness and whole meditation schools that have been developed based on that understanding of the unity of awareness and emptiness. So again, I'd refer listeners who are interested to the book, part three of the book talks about awareness and its relationship to emptiness and talks about some of the meditations in those schools. We kind of just hit it a little bit. I mean, one of the schools is ZogueGen,

CZO, G, C-H-E-N, where one says something like the relationship between awareness and emptiness that again can sound quite academic, but it's actually pretty down earth. It's like close your eyes, listen to all the sounds that are coming up for you, my voice, whatever traffic your children screaming, and then just look for what's knowing those sounds. Joseph teaches this little move all the time in's, I think I believe he stole it from zogeant teachers. And then in that looking, you're going to see there is no little homunculus of you in

there that's hearing all the noises. And you can for ask the further question, which we talked about a few moments ago, who's even asking this question right now? Who's conjuring up this voice in your head? You can tumble down that rabbit hole, not even super intellectually, but experientially, and there's something informative, enlightening, and livening, and healing in just the not finding. Yes, and that's a sign of the emptiness of what we're looking for.

And also that meditation that you pointed out, listening to the sounds, making the mind wide and allowing all the sounds to come and go, when you accompany it with bringing in the attention to body sensations, that starts to break down the conceptual line between inside and outside. Because sounds are conceptualized to be outside, sensations are conceptualized to be inside, sensations are conceptualized to be inside,

but they're both happening in the same wide open space of awareness. So holding them both in the awareness, which is intrinsically empty because it can let anything come into being. They're in nothing jams it up. Nothing fills it. Thank you for blowing our minds. Appreciate that. Before we go, can you plug the book again and any other thing you'd like to plug? I'll be happy to plug my book. My book is called Emptiness a Practical Guide for Meditators.

It's been out for a few years, so it's available both the Kindle and soft cover and hard cover. And I have a lot of talks up on Dharma seed. That's the main place that my teachings are found on the web. So dharmaseed.org is a place where they've done this incredible service of recording Dharma talks from meditation centers like the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock. And you can type in guy Armstrong and you'll get a bunch of his talks, hundreds of them and you can pick any one of them and it'll be great. Thank you, really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Dan. It was a lot of fun.

Big thanks to Guy and thank you as always to the folks who work so hard to make this show a reality. Samuel Johns is our senior producer. Marissa Schneidermann is our producer. Our sound designers are Matt Boyten and Agnieszescik of ultraviolet audio. Maria Wartel is our production coordinator we drive a lot of wisdom from TPH colleagues such as Ben Ruben-Genpoint, Nate Toby and Liz Levin also big thank you as always to Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohan from ABC News. We'll see you all on Wednesday with an episode about burnout. day with an episode about burnout. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music.

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